Despite elegy’s newfound aetiological and epicizing strains in Propertius 4, the book is a veritable chorus of female voices: Arethusa, Tarpeia, Acanthis and Cornelia join Cynthia (in her belated return) to articulate private sentiment and personal experience in the patriarchal world of which, dead or moribund, they are collatoral damage. This chapter explores how Propertius connects his female cast (which includes cameos also from the legendary Cassandra, a priestess of the Bona Dea, and Cleopatra) with the women of Virgil’s Aeneid, who likewise are evanescent (yet never silenced) victims. Chief among these heroines is the ‘elegiac’ Dido, her volubility in life and silence in the underworld refracted in the monologues of Arethusa, Tarpeia and Cynthia. Present too throughout the book are Dido’s Virgilian analogues (e.g., Camilla, Cleopatra and, perhaps, Helen), while the action of the Aeneid as a whole, from the sack of Troy to the Latin war and death of Turnus, are variously rewritten – by Propertius and Horos in opposing programmes, by Cynthia in the militia amoris of her last hurrah and by Cornelia, in whose ghostly allusion to the Danaids echo the final lines of the Aeneid.

Propertius 4.5 is the poet–lover’s vindictive fantasy against the lena, the character who is most inimical to him in the dramatic scenario of love elegy. He expresses his hostility towards her by depicting her as a profoundly grotesque creature, wicked and revolting in every way. Propertius enables the poet–lover to be mercilessly punitive and to use images likely to generate a strong emotional reaction. The images contemplated by the poet–lover in his rage are the same ones contemplated by us, Propertius’ readers, as we move through the text. Being expressions of a rejected lover, such images are likely to generate a sequence of vehement emotions, both within the narrative and in the reading experience, while our gaze and the poet–lover’s both remain fixed on the lena as an embodied source of the dark passions that course through the poem. We would miss the genre’s signature of authenticity if we did not conclude that the grotesque is implicit in and central to the Propertian elegy.